what's the difference between measuring by(bytes or packets)?

Question

Displays the amount of data, in either bytes or packets, sent and received since a connection was established.

Answer 1

Packet switching is a communications paradigm in which packets (units of information carriage) are routed between nodes over data links shared with other traffic. In each network node, packets are queued or buffered, resulting in variable delay. This contrasts with the other principal paradigm, circuit switching, which sets up limited number of constant bit rate and constant delay connections between the nodes for their exclusive use for the duration of the communication.



When a unit of data, beginning at the application layer (top layer) is transmitted to lower layers, headers and trailers are appended to it. Once the unit of data reaches the IP layer and source and destination IP addresses are added to it, it then is known as an IP datagram. The unit of data, feeling a little bloated from having all this extra baggage is then sent to the link layer where source and destination MAC addresses are perpended to it. Now it is called a frame - and more accurately an Ethernet frame (if the physical layer is Ethernet). To be precise, the unit of data passed between the IP layer and the network interface card is really a packet of data. Thus, a packet can be an entire IP datagram or perhaps a fragment of an IP datagram.

UDP units of data, being connectionless (and thus not really too concerned whether the receiver actually got the data or not) are also referred to as datagrams.

This leaves octets. Octets are units of 8 bits (also know as bytes). Thus the maximum size of a frame in Ethernet is 1513 octets or 1513 bytes. Any larger and the frame must be split or fragmented. As you might expect, fragmentation causes delay so it is good to keep all your frames below the MTU size.

Answer 2

Bytes are 8 bits. A bit is a single 1 or 0. When measuring bytes the statistic is just for the raw number of bytes regardless of the meaning of the byte.

In a data network, i.e. the Internet or you home network that connects to the Internet. Information is moved around using "packets". The packets contain a "header" and a "payload". The header is overhead, such as source address/destination address etc.. Think of the header on a packet similar to the envelope that your regular post mail arrives in. Most of the time you could care less about the envelope, but if the information wasn't on the envelope the letter inside would never arrive in your mailbox. So some of those bytes are really for the overhead of the envelope. Depending on the various protocols being used, some have a lot of overhead, others don't. Voice over IP for example is more header than payload.

So to continue that analogy, assume for a second that the post office "could" count every alpha-numeric written letter on a document inside of an envelope.

The post office would tell you that they delivered X many envelopes and Y many alpha-numeric characters every day.

Packets range in size thus some deliver more information than others. Network equipment has more of a burden forwarding small packets then large packets. You can determine things like average packet size etc.. with this data.

Answer 3

Bytes are simply put, groups of 8 bits, no more, no less. There are 256 possibilities. It is convenient that a character in the ASCII character set is represented by 8 bits. Essentially, using bytes is like saying some number of characters per unit time. Packets are groups of many bytes

Answer 4

Just out of interest I've seen electricity (at least the blue spark when it jumps, my great grandfather though only in pictures, and a human brain though I was not in the best of conditions). I have even measured of of those 3! The simple and sad fact is that people can only argue on the own personal level of understanding! So I suppose that means we have to come down to their level! Jonny I must tell you, that the Big fat man dressed in red with the long white beard that you saw last Xmas eve, was in fact your Uncle Joey and he wont be coming again next year! Not after your father caught be dressed as bat man hiding in the wardrobe!!! Could all be a little complex!! some people just don't want to know the hard realality of the facts of life!!